“Europe鈥檚 new external investment strategy needs to reconnect with historical business models we are going back to white elephants of 1970s 鈥� because that鈥檚 what partners want“
– G7 official in a speech on Trade and Finance.
“The era of Western dominance has indeed definitely ended“
– Josep Borrell (2024).听
On 28 January 2024, three members of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso, announced their withdrawal from ECOWAS. Created in 1974, ECOWAS is a regional economic community serving as a large trading bloc, to enhance the regional integration and economic cooperation of its 15 member countries. The three countries鈥� decision to leave the trade-bloc so forthrightly, was related to a series of ECOWAS-imposed sanctions on their military governments and the countries鈥� objection to French influence in the bloc. Long-standing dissatisfaction with the ECOWAS was also an overarching factor; member countries include some of the most resource-rich nations, but on the whole members barely made any progress on socio-economic indicators linked to the ECOWAS promise of prosperity through regional integration.
Political uncertainty in the trade-bloc further deteriorated in mid-February 2024, when the Senegalese President Macky Sall, unilaterally postponed the country鈥檚 presidential elections and was later ousted. Faced with such existential challenges, ECOWAS lifted sanctions on Niger and other countries within a month of their imposition. While the potential breakdown of ECOWAS and the general trajectory of some African countries into authoritarianism, may not seem like a radical shift in the continent鈥檚 history, the incendiary global context, which compelled ECOWAS to lift sanctions is unprecedented. The neo-colonial drivers of the current crumbling political order in Sudan and the Congo as well as the ongoing genocide in Palestine, indelibly expose the reality that we are entering into an era of naked colonial violence. Backlash to US-centred imperialism is growing. In March 2024, Niger suspended all military relations with the US, citing issues related to US encroachment upon its sovereignty. Embedded in this evolving situation, the episodic and ad-hoc de-linking of Global South countries from Global North countries and their dominance in blocs such as the ECOWAS is representative of a broader shift in Africa鈥檚 resistance against political and economic subordination to G7 countries.
Against this background, the Western powers鈥� new and evolving development strategy in Africa offers important insights into how the G7 countries are failing to register the transformative changes in Africa. In a closed-door speech on investment, trade and finance forum, a G7 official described Europe鈥檚 new external investment strategy as one that harkens back to the White elephants of the 1970s. While the speaker was using the term 鈥榃hite Elephant鈥� to signify the EU鈥檚 interest in funding hard infrastructure, imbued with a promise of investment and growth for recipient countries, he clearly failed to grasp its meaning. A 鈥榳hite elephant鈥� is an overly expensive infrastructure asset, which fails to generate value for the economy.
Considered in light of the correct definition of the term, the West鈥檚 new development strategy does seem to be going towards expensive infrastructure projects, spurred by a reactionary, performative but ultimately imagined competition with China. I make this point through a comparative analysis between the G7s contemporary development strategy vis-脿-vis the Chinese development model as it unfolds within the broader demise of US-led imperialism.
Drawing realised by artist Pawel Kuczy艅ski for Serena Natile’s book
I came to the study of fintech as a feminist socio-legal scholar researching the gender dynamics of South-South migration. While doing fieldwork in Kenya for my PhD in 2012, I came across M-Pesa, a mobile money service used by locals as an instrument for transferring money from urban to rural areas. From the start of my research in 2011 to the completion of my PhD in 2016, ongoing studies on M-Pesa were mainly celebratory. It was acclaimed as an innovative instrument for poverty reduction, development, and gender equality and was enthusiastically supported by donors and international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as well as by tech entrepreneurs and corporate philanthropy. Its success story was so uncontested that I decided to change my research question to focus on the gender dynamics of digital financial inclusion, rather than on my initial interest, migration.
The key narrative of M-Pesa鈥檚 success in terms of gender equality was, and still is, that it facilitates women鈥檚 access to financial services, providing them with a variety of opportunities to improve their own livelihoods and those of their families, their communities, and ultimately their countries. In the specific case of M-Pesa, a basic-mobile-phone-enabled money transfer service is considered more accessible and available than transferring money via mainstream financial institutions such as banks, and more reliable and secure than informal finance channels such as moneylenders or the handling of cash via rotating credit and savings associations (ROSCAs). This claim is based on three assumptions: first, that women have less access to financial services than men have; second, that women would use their access to finance to support not only themselves but also their families and communities; and third, that digital financial services are better than informal financial channels because they overcome the limits of cash, ensuring traceability and security. These assumptions motivated advocacy and investment in digital financial inclusion projects and the creation of ad hoc programmes and institutions, all strongly focused on the question of how digital technology can be used to facilitate women鈥檚 access to financial services.
When we discuss the climate crisis in economics, we are often confronted with a debate resting on technical solutions, emissions paths, and energy use: a certain amount of time to go from coal to turbines means a certain amount of carbon dioxide emitted, which means a certain likely degree of global temperature change. In environmental economics, climate change and its associated environmental problems are often framed as 鈥榚xternalities鈥�; that is, unfortunate and unintended spillovers caused by market mechanisms. Often, social issues are taken into account within this narrative through sunny phrases like 鈥渟ustainable development鈥� or 鈥渏ust transition.鈥� The responsible parties are often individuals, states, or firms that are often thought to take action within the market. What does this debate look like if we take two different questions as starting points: not how to solve the climate crisis through market mechanisms and regulation, but how to solve the climate crisis while attending to the colonial legacy and exiting from contemporary neo-colonial accumulation patterns? Let us take a look.
Imperialism is still a relevant concept today, woven much more tightly into the structures of countries and economies than ever. The outcome of those seeking to expand their ownership or influence has stayed just as colonial and imperialist as ever before, especially now with the massive amount of capital accumulated in developed countries and the influence these countries have over the rest of the world. In a paper by John Foster, he quotes Harry Magdoff when he said, 鈥淚mperialism is the way of life of capitalism,鈥� when asked if it was still necessary (Foster et al., 2019). To expand, capitalism needs a mode or justification or framework that it adopts and has a history of working so well with, and that is imperialism. Colonizing, occupying, and dominating are blatant ways that imperialism effectively occurs in history. It has not changed significantly except that the people furthering their 鈥渆xpansion鈥� are not outrightly removing, killing, or taking resources from people; they now sign policies, laws, or rules, and then people follow this or follow it by force. Historically, the effects of imperialism have remained. We see this in the Native Americans who are forced to live on reservations whose way of life and traditions are limited due to state and private ownership of surrounding land in the form of preservations, parks, or plants for resourcing.
Imperialism can manifest in various forms: military, economic, cultural, agricultural, technological, and political influence. The United States, for example, has the largest military in the world, spending billions of dollars on funding its military and weaponry and maintaining this presence in countries worldwide. It has military bases all over the U.S. but also in Japan, Germany, and South Korea, amongst the most significant bases, and then in at least 80 countries such as Turkey, Bahrain, Spain, Honduras, and Cuba (O’Dell, 2023). This form of maintaining an imperialist presence is, in many ways, a reminder of the global hegemon that is the U.S. militarily and economically. The 鈥渟ilent鈥� presence of the military that Prabhat Patnaik discusses in his paper 鈥淲hatever Happened to Imperialism鈥� symbolizes the coercion of power the U.S. has over the rest of the world. A reminder that the United States could quickly get involved in smaller countries’ affairs (Patnaik, 1990). It is an effective tactic since massive amounts of weaponry can easily overpower another country or group of people.
Even more significantly, imperialism has manifested in global food systems. During the rise of the United States into its power today, there are clear examples of state-sponsored policies that changed the diets and modes of producing food. This mode of controlling and forcing people to consume food of the dominant hegemonic power has been seen throughout history, especially with indigenous peoples’ communities. An example of this state influence over food in indigenous communities is in what is now known as California; during the 1850s, with the invasion of European Americans, the people that lived in the Klamath Mountains, the Karuk People, were severely affected by the racial formations and domination for land and resources that the state was forcing upon them. The Karuk people lived near the Klamath River, and fishing was a primary form of survival in 1970. Although they had legal rights to fish in their river, state officials often arrested them for fishing, destroying their way of life and traditions. In this example, we see the state forcing people to assimilate. Since many of the Karuk people were trying not to be arrested or even killed, many of them resorted to eating government food, which lacked nutrients and was also forcing the native people to consume and engage in practices that were 鈥淲hite鈥� behaviors via boarding schools and other consumption behaviors that were not a part of their culture (Norgaard, 2011). Also, arresting the indigenous people is trying to erase the existence of these people in the first place, which is genocide continuing. This example of the Karuk people demonstrates how taking over land, either physically or legally(coercively), is perhaps a dominant way to maintain and gain control of people. The ability to own land or own the means of how food is produced is vital in being able to live healthily and sustainably. Also, food in almost any culture has significant meaning and symbolizes traditions passed down. Removing traditional food and practices removes culture and identity. If imperialism is how a state or group of people exercises control to maintain power via economic and social relations, then the first and most dominant way is to remove the ability to access resources for food. This is followed by the stripping away of culture and traditions. This happened with the Native Americans and still occurs in the global south and north today, although how those limitations exist in each may vary.
The spread of corporate power and how quickly it has dominated food and other consumed agricultural resources is also relevant to how it impacts development. Using the United States as the example in this analysis, how it produces its food and is influenced by corporate power in agricultural industries affects other developing countries where many of the subsidized crops grown here are exported. Philip McMichael highlights the corporate food regime in their analysis of food regimes and their history in the Handbook of Critical Agrarian Studies by Akram-Lodhi. McMichael denotes that a corporate food regime has risen in this neoliberal era of corporate power. A food regime plagued with exporting grains and crops to developing countries while continuing its high grain growth here in the U.S. The Farm Bill heavily subsidizes corn, wheat, soy, and rice and directly fuels this. He writes
In the 1990s, trade agreements (notably the WTO and associated free trade agreements) instituted liberalization measures to universalize 鈥榤arket rule鈥� via neoliberal agricultural investment and trade freedoms for transnational agribusiness. US and European Union subsidies for agribusiness artificially cheapened foodstuffs for dumping in world markets at the expense of now unprotected Southern farmers’ (Lodhi et al., 2021).
This advanced the dominance of the United States imperial programming and subjugated developing countries into cycles of foreign debt and political unrest. Artificially deflating the price of crops, countries struggled to develop large agricultural industries and could not develop economically past the agricultural stage. The United States used this domination to convince developing countries that they could develop manufacturing and resource extraction-based industries by increasing their reliance on foreign aid and foreign investment. However, they were subordinated into global structures of domination and colonization that few countries have been able to escape. In this conceptualization of corporate food regimes, McMichael denotes how the corporate influence of power affects not only U.S. consumers but also the livelihoods of small agricultural producers, domestically and internationally. Having power over food and agriculture is a prevalent form of imperialism and capitalism, and this severely impacts the course of development. If the most basic form of sustainment is unavailable, then, from a nutrition standpoint, how can people function and live properly? Malnutrition from starvation or nutrient deficiencies severely impacts survival or health outcomes.
An example of food imperialism can be seen in Palestine, which, under its occupation, cannot control its access to land and water resources. This has led, over the decades, and more prominently now in the current crisis, to severe food insecurity and malnutrition. In the West Bank, 63% of the cultivable land is under Israeli government control, and they only have about 15% access to groundwater from the Western Aquifer Basin. In contrast, the Israeli government controls and uses the rest (~85%). Controlling land and limiting what food can be grown and imported have impacted the course of development for these people (Shaban, 2022). In the relevance and different forms that imperialism has, this is a current example of the historically brutal forms in which power is exercised over people through agriculture and food.
Seeing corporate power reflected here in the United States, we can turn to the poultry industry and labor practices that occur here in the efforts to produce massive quantities of meat and profit. In 2019, the U.S. poultry industry produced 42 billion pounds of chicken, more than any other country globally, enough to give every person on Earth about 5.32 pounds of chicken (Freshour et al. 2020). Most of the workers in the processing plants are Black, and many are ex-felons since this is one of the few industries that will hire them. Many workers are subjected to long hours of standing and monotonous work on a processing line that will often speed up, and workers must work faster to process the meat. Not only creating health issues such as arthritis but also the time taken away from these workers to rest.
Agriculture and food are areas of extreme relevance to the concept of imperialism. Manifesting through corporate power, the economic and social relations that spread hegemonic domination over agriculture and food is one of the fastest ways to extend a state鈥檚 or group’s influence over countries and people. What people need to survive more than anything is food and water. To have influence or control over how it is produced and distributed, as well as who produces and distributes it, is a clear demonstration of the relevance of the concept of imperialism. This is why steps taken to remove much of the corporate power held in the global agricultural industry are essential in creating a more just and sustainable future.
References
Akram-Lodhi, A. H., Dietz, Kristina, and Engels, Bettina, eds. 2021. Handbook of Critical Agrarian Studies. Chapter 25. Food Regimes Philip McMichael, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited. Accessed December 15, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Foster, John B., Utsa Patnaik, Prabhat Patnaik, Samir Amin, Intan Suwandi, Hannah Holleman, Brett Clark, Ricardo Antunes, Harry Magdoff, and Firoze Manji. 2019. 鈥�.鈥� Monthly Review.
Freshour, Carrie, Nick Estes, Roxanne Dunbar, Charisse Burden, Bill Fletcher, Lilia D. Monz贸, Jesse Benjamin, et al. 2020. 鈥�.鈥� Monthly Review.
Norgaard, K. M., Reed, R., & Van Horn, C. (2011). A continuing legacy: Institutional racism, Hunger and nutritional justice on the Klamath. in Alkon, A. H., & Agyeman, J. (Eds.). (2011). Cultivating Food Justice: Race: Class, and Sustainability. MIT Press.
O’Dell, Hope. 2023. 鈥溾�� Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
Patnaik, Prabhat. 1990. 鈥溾�� Monthly Review.
Shaban, Omar. 2022. 鈥�.鈥� Arab Center Washington DC.
Mirette Nunez is a master’s student in Economics at The New School. Her research interests are in the effects of corporate power and capitalism听on global food and agriculture systems.听
Feeling helpless does not mean being useless. It is possible to support Palestinians from afar.
College instructors, particularly those in Europe and North America, are generally limited when it comes to meaningful intervention in imperialist horrors afflicting the Global South. Nevertheless, it is usually their governments either orchestrating or abetting the horror. They ought to do something, then, even if it seems pyrrhic or inadequate.
People around the world are now witnessing a particularly gruesome event as the Zionist entity, armed by its U.S. sponsor and enjoying the support of capitalist institutions across the globe, commits one atrocity after the other in the Gaza Strip (along with the West Bank and at times further afield). The atrocities, anyone with a modicum of integrity agrees, add up to genocide. The depth of grief and suffering Palestinians now experience is indescribable, immeasurable.
Do professors and other campus workers have any ability to mitigate the grief and suffering? Not really. But we鈥檙e not entirely powerless, either. Higher education is an important sector for information and activism and an industry where participants like to contemplate the role of both exceptional and ordinary people in making a better world. Like anybody else, teachers and researchers can be most effective in their own communities, which are not inoculated from the genocide. Zionist groups have organized hundreds of defamation campaigns against Palestinian students and faculty, often resulting in employment termination and other serious forms of recrimination. These campaigns don鈥檛 exist in a vacuum. Targeting Palestinians and anti-Zionists is an extension of the genocide, or at least one of its attendant tactics. And then, of course, many of the campuses are somehow invested in the Zionist entity鈥攆inancially, politically, or logistically. It does no good to say that 鈥渨e鈥� aren鈥檛 affected by what happens 鈥渢here.鈥�
The on-going ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians in 2023, marks the end of the fa莽ade of the peaceful Western liberal order. At least people have been killed by direct war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan. While these countries were subject to the different ebbs and flows of US imperial violence. Palestinians have paid the heaviest price. The historical occupation of Palestine has always been a socio-economic precondition for the cohesion of the but the current ethnic cleansing can no longer be contained through the usual narrative control tools and an ever intensifying climate of fear promulgated to the ends of silencing and chilling legitimate support for Palestine internationally. As notes, the genocide has shown us that 鈥�Impunity isn鈥檛 beholden to disapproval鈥�, and we continue to bear witness to the genocide for ourselves and for the next generation. The current genocide is the clearest expression of the decrepitude of the Western order in a state of ongoing entropy. What follows shall be bereaved of the usual pretences of 鈥榙emocracy鈥� and 鈥榟uman rights鈥� and thus more naked, brutal and yet more reactionary. The Western order is generating the conditions for its demise. In this, Palestine leads the way. Palestine changes everything.
The great cultural theorist Stuart Hall called Frantz Fanon鈥檚 The Wretched of the Earth 鈥榯he bible of decolonisation鈥� as it encapsulated the urge for freedom across the colonial world (). Fanon illuminates how racism represented an organising principle for capitalist classes by systematically devaluing the lives of the majority of the world鈥檚 population. 鈥楩or centuries the capitalists have behaved like real war criminals in the underdeveloped world,鈥� he wrote. 鈥楧eportation, massacres, forced labour, and slavery were the primary methods used by capitalism to increase its gold and diamond reserves, and establish its wealth and power鈥� ().
One of the reasons for Fanon鈥檚 popularity among those who want to decolonise development is that he argued that post-colonial countries should forge their own paths to development rather than attempting to follow already developed countries. 鈥楾he Third World must not be content to define itself in relation to values which preceded it,鈥� he warned. 鈥橭n the contrary, the underdeveloped countries must endeavour to focus on their very own values as well as methods and style specific to them.鈥�
Not only did Fanon explain the horrors inflicted by colonialism upon native populations; crucially, he also conceived of real human development as a process rooted in a collective labouring class (comprising workers and poor peasants) transcending capitalist brutality.
However these two elements of his thought 鈥� the critical identification of the violence of colonialism, and a real human developmental alternative to it 鈥� have often been disconnected by thinkers influential to the decolonial movement. This represents a dangerous misinterpretation of Fanon. It obscures his vision of a decolonised world and the social forces able to construct it.
A new calendar year ushers in the usual array of tropes on Africa. They include why the continent is failing, what it should be doing better and why it has so much resilience in dealing with its own frailty. Overwhelmingly, Western institutions (NGOs, credit rating agencies, etc.) repeat tired mantras of the international 铿乶ancial institutions, ignoring the insights of African scholar activists and the historical backdrop to the continent鈥檚 contemporary crises. Neglect of such analysis leads to the failure to understand why and how different African countries are in the mess that they are and why the mess has structural continuities and conjunctural discontinuities. The antidote to Western-centric analysis is the superb collection of essays in a special issue of Africa Development, a journal of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), which emerged from the Post-Colonialisms Today project. The range and insight of the collection is difficult to capture in a short review, but there are two continuous themes among contributors: the importance of revisiting the historical past and the signi铿乧ance of sovereignty, or the absence of it.
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